Excited to get started on your new app? Before you dive in, make sure you’re prepared. It’s easy to underestimate the work involved in building a software product. The good news is that there are some basic steps you can take before starting development that can help make sure it goes smoothly from start to finish.
You have an idea.
The first thing you need to know is that you have an idea, and it’s not a bad one. You can feel pretty accomplished for having thought of the idea in the first place, and if the world has yet to see your genius software concept, then there will be no better time than now for you to share it with someone who can help bring it into existence.
That being said: before talking with a developer or anyone else about your software idea, make sure that they’re going to truly understand what your idea is. Anyone can come up with some ideas in their head… you might even think they’re great! But how can you know if those ideas are good? We don’t always know right away (and sometimes never). So the first thing to do is to see if your idea is worth the trouble. You can do this by asking your friends and family for a honest opinion about it, post about it in different online gropus and see the response or if you want to go the extra mile, you can even hire a market research company.
It’s all about time & money.
People have a tendency to think that software development is a process that happens in a vacuum. But it’s not! Software developers live in the real world, which means they need to eat, pay rent and make sure their kids are healthy and happy. Which means every hour they spend developing your software comes at the cost of some other projects they could be working on instead. So you need to be prepared for this upfront: developing software is a process: it takes both time and money. It takes time to implement it, test it, maintain it and update it. And finally, there’s also the training component — teaching clients how to use the new system so they can take full advantage of all its features.
In other words: time is money both for you and the developers. Just as you value yours, they also value theirs. This doesn’t mean that they are not flexible, it just means that, just like anywhere else, you just need to use common sense regarding you requests and to bear in mind that anything outside the initial scope of the project adds more time and therefore it generates additional costs.
Before you jump into a project, make sure you know what you need for it to be successful.
Lastly, before talking with a software developer, you should make sure you know what you need for the project to be successful. That means defining the problem and setting goals. Don’t worry about what other people’s goals are — it’s your project! Be ambitious, but stay realistic. Once you’ve established what needs to be done and how it gets done, then we can get into how much time it will take or what kind of budget we’re looking at — but only when we know whether or not this is something worth doing at all! We will never do a project that won’t add real value to you or your business.
We hope this article has helped you understand some of the basic things you should know about the software development process. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us!
We’re always happy to help.